[CLUE-Tech] Linear RAID vs. LVM

[Nate Duehr]

On Feb 15, 2004, at 6:08 PM, Ski Dawg wrote:

> I am a little confused about this. I want to do a new install. I have 2
> smaller hard drives in the system, but I want to treat them 1 large 
> hard
> drive. The reading that I have done so far would suggest that I can do
> this with either a Linear RAID or with LVM.
>
> Am I understanding each of these correctly? Which would provide me with
> the better solution? Why? Any suggestions for things to pay attention 
> to
> when doing the partitioning/setup?

I guess the big question is:  Are you going to add more drives to it in 
the future?

LVM gives you the flexibility (at the cost of added complexity) to add 
a third, fourth, fifth drive -- if your hardware can do that) later on.

Otherwise the added complexity might not be worth it.

And remember, as with any stripe-set, if one of the drives fails, 
you'll have a mess... probably not very recoverable.

If it's not a server and you're not going to add disks later, and have 
no pressing desire to learn LVM or someting similar... the RAID 0 from 
RedHat's installer would probably be the easiest.

I had a "play machine" an old Pentium I that was set up with a couple 
of small drives RAID 0'ed and when one of the disks died I just kinda 
wrote it off and started over with a different OS load... could have 
dinked with it and tried to recover some stuff, pretending it was a 
"production" machine, but with it as slow as is is, it wasn't worth the 
effort.

Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com